


Cleaning Out the Rooms

by CourierNew



Category: OMORI (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28971924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: The truth comes out. Aubrey keeps busy.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 285





	Cleaning Out the Rooms

**Author's Note:**

> What do you stay beautiful for?  
> \- Sunset Rubdown, "Child-Heart Losers"

Aubrey has trouble sleeping in summer. Her bedroom is in the attic and the heat rises and coats her like a fungus, even with the fan turned as high as it can go. At night she watches it swivel back and forth and hopes that it will be enough for her rabbit (catatonic in its hutch, greedily slurping its water bottle) until her eyelids grow heavy, and in the morning the heat coaxes her out of bed all over again. It has always been this way.

She shuffles downstairs and showers and brushes her teeth, the TV’s babble and screech audible from the living room. Her mother works in a clothing store further out of town and on weekdays she would already be gone, but it’s Sunday and so she has instead taken her place in the greasy divot on the couch. Aubrey returns to her room, dresses, feeds her rabbit, and then pulls open her desk drawer and extracts a mostly-full pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She harangued Vance into getting her these last month, and while Aubrey has found smoking to be horrible in virtually every way, she figured that she might as well learn to do at least one thing this summer.

She instinctively begins to breathe through her mouth when she enters the living room. Her mother does not look at her. She is there as always, a heap of slackened dough in a ratty grey sweatsuit. The rusty air conditioner’s guttural breeze plucks at the dry frizz of her hair, interrupts the orbits of flies buzzing around the house’s strata of trash. Aubrey pulls open the kitchen cabinets, locates a cereal box, and stares into its contents, watching for any scuttling black specks. She pours it into a bowl and eats it dry with tapwater at her elbow. The television’s yammer goes on as she chews.

Aubrey is intimately familiar with states of decay. She knows that pizza cheese will petrify and lo mein degenerate into muck; she can differentiate between the sourness of spoiled milk versus the sickly-sweet rustiness of rotten meat; she deafens herself to the occasional rustling noises heard within these piles of fetid refuse. When she was younger her mother was much the same, a mute and yeasty phantom drifting in and out of the house, but her father would keep the place clean, angrily, begrudgingly. If Aubrey forgot to hang up a towel after drying herself, he’d shout at her until they were both red in the face, one from rage and the other from tears. After Mari died and everyone drifted apart, she spent more time at home for a while, so she could witness the growing crescendo of his frustration. When he finally left, she couldn’t find it in her to be surprised. Her desk for some months after was littered with the crumpled remains of unfinished letters.

The filth piled up after that. The child support checks arrived on schedule, and her mother held it together well enough outside the house to keep their neighbors fooled, but once she crossed the front door and into this stinking miasma she stopped pretending. She would halfheartedly scrape the trash into garbage bags and leave it where it stood, or drop beer bottles into their cushioning mass, the necks still bearing droplets of amber liquid. Her grocery shopping was sporadic and hopelessly random; one day she carried in two bags of nothing but Q-tips and talcum powder.

Aubrey gets by, despite it all. She eats from takeout containers or pizza boxes, or bums food off Kim and Vance. She dyes her hair like she’d always wanted and stays outside where the air is sweeter. Sometimes she has nightmares of walking over to that couch and grabbing her mother by the throat only to find that she is just an empty skin, hollow and slick as a rubber glove.

Years of this.

Sunny moved away two weeks ago. Basil’s grandmother was buried last week. Nothing else has really changed.

Aubrey finishes her cereal and drops the spoon and bowl into the sink, then opens the front door and goes outside. Behind her, the house continues to rot.

* * *

_“I have something to tell you.”_

_Aubrey is unable to hide her relief when Sunny enters the hospital room. The sight of him splayed out on Basil’s carpet, half his face streaked in blood from his slashed eye, has haunted her all day. But then Sunny begins to talk, unleashing truths like pus from a long-infected boil. Looking back, Aubrey believes that it’s the most she’s ever heard him speak at once._

_The story is told in clipped and dispassionate sentences that are oddly disjointed, like Sunny is turning the words around in his mouth, looking for the best way to spit them out. When he tells them about his burning, miserable frustration with the violin, the way Mari would scoff and sigh and roll her eyes at the latest screeched string or fumbled vibrato, Aubrey feels a pit slowly open in her gut. When he tells them about what occurred atop the staircase, she sees Hero jerk to attention out the corner of her eye, and grabs him by the arm before he can lunge forward. His story is insane, a grisly fairytale. But at the end, when he finally stutters to a halt and hangs his head like he’s awaiting the noose, she looks behind her and sees Basil with his sheets pulled to his trembling chin, and knows that it’s all true. The five of them are frozen rigid. Hero’s eyes are dark and flat as musket balls._

_Then Kel, the sentimental dope that he is, rushes forward and hugs Sunny. They say something to each other but Aubrey is no longer listening. She can’t stop thinking about that day at the lake, Mari diving into the water to pull her brother out. He could have drowned without her. So how could he. How dare he. Aubrey wants to rip him out of Kel’s arms and slam him into the wall, screaming those questions into his face, but then Sunny slowly hugs Kel back and Aubrey understands that it’s pointless. Those questions would have been running on loop in his own head, ever since that day._

_She looks back at Hero and his mouth is a thin cut, his face pale. She’s been gripping him hard enough to make his bones creak. She releases him and he massages his arm, and says in a stiff and distant voice that they should leave, give Sunny and Basil some time together. This is how he’s always been, playing the adult, taking charge of the people around him if he can’t get control of himself._

_Kel takes it upon himself to reassure Sunny over the course of the day, make promises that they don’t know if they’ll be able to keep, but Aubrey and Hero neither see nor speak to him again before he leaves town. The last Aubrey sees of him is in that moment, as Kel clutches him close – his face hanging like the moon over Kel’s shoulder, his remaining eye pinned wide, wet tear-trails glimmering in the overhead lights._

* * *

She hasn’t gone to Mass since the day Sunny and Kel confronted her in the pews, but she still comes to the church often, at the times when the only movement is the slow promenade of dust motes and stained-glass light. The church and graveyard are both good places for being alone, and Aubrey needs solitude now more than ever. She’d calmly but firmly asked Kim and the others to give her space for a little while, and they acquiesced, believing she still needed time to process all that had occurred with Sunny and Basil that night. They are more right than they know. She doesn’t want them to see the secrets digesting behind her eyes.

The pastor is there alone, sitting in a center pew, and gives her a curt nod as Aubrey walks by. She nods back. She suspects the pastor has gleaned more about her home life than he lets on, but lacks either the will or the knowledge to approach her about it. He is understanding enough to still allow her in the church after that fight, but not enough to defend her to the other churchgoers. That’s fine with her. The town’s gossip is noise.

She leaves out the back door and into the stifling, pollen-scented heat of the cemetery. The groundskeeper is absent; she’s alone with the graves. She takes a few steps forward and fishes the cigarettes and lighter out from her jacket pocket. It takes several aggravating clicks before the lighter’s flame jumps out, and she holds it to the cigarette’s end, brings it up, breathes, and immediately erupts into a coughing fit. Every time she thinks this will be easier, and every time she’s proven wrong.

She replaces the lighter, wipes her mouth, and then freezes, the back of her hand still pressed to her lips. There is sudden movement among the ranked stones. A pallid face popping up like a weed, ringed with unkempt blond hair. Basil. He’d been kneeling before his grandmother’s grave, so still that he’d blended in with the plants.

Aubrey stares. Basil stares. Neither breaks eye contact. She can either turn and flee back into the church, or carry on like he isn’t there. She chooses the latter.

Cigarette between her lips, she strides across the graveyard and to Mari’s stone. She visited here often over the last several years but now it’s become a daily ritual, a silent interrogation of a mute witness. She watches the shadows pool in the stone’s inscribed epitaph and flicks through her memories of Mari like playing cards, wondering if there was any hint of the disaster Sunny had shared with them in that hospital room. Aubrey can vaguely recall flashes of Mari’s exacting, almost grating standards for everything around her – compulsively smoothing out her picnic blankets, always ready with a self-effacing remark about her cooking or her music. They’d mostly found it charming then. Maybe it wasn’t so pleasant to be left alone with her, grinded beneath the millstone of her perfectionism. As if that were an excuse for what he’d done.

Why couldn’t it have been an excuse. They were all so young.

That blazing summer afternoon. The rapid patter of bare feet on wood. Mari leaping off the dock, her sundress billowing around her like cumulus.

Aubrey can hear dirt crunching behind her. The sound grows closer no matter how much she wills it to cease. When Basil’s reedy voice slithers into her ear, she almost bites the cigarette in half.

“Where’d you get that?” he asks.

Aubrey coughs out more smoke, pinches the cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “Vance hooked me up. He works part-time at a corner store now.”

“Oh,” he says. She expects him to scold her, and knows that if he does, she won’t be able to stop herself from hurting him. But instead he asks, “Is it fun?”

She turns to look at him then, incredulously, and he flinches under her gaze. He’s the same twitching, haunted waif as always, knees smeared with dirt, flower in his hair. The bruises and scabs Sunny had given him are already healed. There’s no trace of sarcasm in his features. She studies the cigarette, its end already crumbling to ash.

“Not really,” she mutters.

“Oh.” The obvious follow-up – _then why are you doing it?_ – remains unspoken. Aubrey is made to fill the silence.

“Sorry about your grandma,” she says. She’d been at the funeral with Hero and Kel. Basil had stood apart from the rest of them, grieving alone, cocooned in his guilt.

“Thanks. It was coming for a while. She wasn’t really there, for the last few months.”

“Polly’s still around?”

“Uh-huh. My parents are still paying her. They called, after Grandma passed. They would have come but they couldn’t have gotten a flight in time. That’s what they said.”

Basil’s parents are perpetually abroad; Aubrey has never seen them once, not even in photograph. When she was younger she wondered if they were even real, but nowadays the idea of family that exist as little more than shadow and noise holds a grim believability.

“I’m helping Polly pack up her room,” Basil goes on. “We’re going to turn it into a nursery. For plants, I mean. N-not the other kind.”

“I figured, yeah.”

Basil kneads his hands together for a second, throat bobbing like he’s struggling to swallow. “How are Kel and Hero doing?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t talked much.”

“Oh. Okay. What about-”

“Not Sunny, either.”

“Okay.” His knuckles whiten, then relax. “It was nice seeing you, Aubrey. I’ll leave you alone now.”

He turns away and Aubrey reaches out and grabs him by his bony shoulder. He goes ramrod-stiff and for a moment she’s worried he’s about to enter another screaming fit, but all that comes from his throat is a thin whimper. Aubrey forces her voice to stay low, her grip to remain loose.

“How did you do it?” she asks. “I don’t even care about the reason, I just want to know _how._ Wasn’t she _heavy?_ Did you ever stop to think about what you were doing?”

“I can’t remember,” he whispers. He shudders under her hand like his skin is trying to escape the bone. “All I can remember is my hands. His hands. Moving. Carrying. After it was done I was so tired, I couldn’t lift my arms for almost a week, but I only realized it when it was done, and I looked up, and I saw…I never should have looked, I never…”

She releases him then, because his voice is beginning to fracture, and he hiccups and wipes his face and keeps his back turned. The tree branches overhead bend and sway.

“I’m sorry,” says Basil. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. I’ll stay away from now on, okay? If you see the others again, please let them know how sorry I am. For everything.”

He totters away, and makes it almost halfway to the church door before Aubrey says, “Wait.”

And he does, and Aubrey has to think fast, because she doesn’t fully understand why she said it. She can only think of these asphyxiating silences, and festering secrets, and the sense that there was some great transformation that should have yet been imminent; these lonely summer days shouldn’t be allowed to continue as they were, after what they’d learned. Something had to change. Further steps taken. And then she knows what has to be done.

“I want your help with something,” Aubrey says.

Basil turns slowly, arms raised like he’s expecting her to punch him as soon as they face each other. But she stays in place, the cigarette still in her hand.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Come to my house at nine tomorrow morning. Bring as much cleaning stuff as you can carry. Gloves, garbage bags, sponges, bleach, whatever. Wear the shittiest clothes you’ve got. And pack a lunch, while you’re at it.” She pauses. “This isn’t going to be fun.”

“Okay,” he says. No questions. The state he’s in, he would eagerly consent if she asked him to pour gasoline over himself and strike a match. She hopes this isn’t a mistake.

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says, and grinds what’s left of the cigarette out on her shoeheel. “Get some rest. You’ll need it.”

* * *

But Aubrey can’t sleep.

She’s gotten into the habit of taking late-night walks, when the heat and her thoughts become too much to bear. The town slumbers early; if she steps out after eleven or so, she can wander through streets with only the murmuring breeze for company. She pinballs between the church, the park, the shopping-plaza fountain, and as she travels between these landmarks her hair stands out in the darkness like a day-glo ghost.

Tonight she’s bound for Sunny’s house, which is shut and blinded, the grass already overgrown. There are times when she contemplates jumping the fence and going to the treehouse in the backyard, but the thought of it still makes her heart race – she doesn’t believe in ghosts, but there are places weighted too heavily with memory, and they can grow teeth and claws. It’s a quarter to midnight and she ambles down the street with hands in jacket pockets, one thumb idly rubbing her lighter. In her head she tries to create a schedule for tomorrow, assuming Basil decides to show up.

At Kel and Hero’s house, the upper windows are still lit, and she stops and stares at them from the sidewalk and tries to glimpse movement in that buttery glow. After the funeral, Hero had suggested that they all take a break from each other for a little while to process what they had learned. Aubrey didn’t argue, partly because some time apart from Kel would do her good, and partly because she knew that Hero was speaking for himself more than others – another old habit of his, substituting his desires with those of the group. In Aubrey’s experience, people seldom changed, either.

One window flings itself up and Aubrey recoils in shock, almost falling flat into the street. Kel leans over the sill, dressed in his undershirt, the oblong of his face unreadable. He holds Aubrey’s gaze for a moment and then makes a complicated finger-pointing gesture that appears to be a cross between semaphore and an epileptic fit, but Aubrey can discern its meaning well enough: _do you want to come in?_

She shakes her head and mouths _no_ while contriving to look as indignant as possible – Kel’s mother would have an aneurysm if someone came into the house this late – but underneath, she’s relieved. If Kel is feeling good enough to suggest something that foolish, then Hero must not be doing too badly himself. Kel gives her an exaggerated shrug, and then a far more timid wave. After a long moment, Aubrey waves back. They stand there, each of their faces obscured by darkness and distance, trying to establish some unspoken connection.

Finally, Kel pushes down the window. The light goes out. Aubrey looks to Sunny’s house, the night having rendered it down to angular anonymity, like a gutted carcass. She turns away and returns home. There’s no longer anything there to see.

* * *

_The move is delayed by Sunny’s stay in the hospital. His mother shows up at last, and only Kel is present for their reunion, but Aubrey is later told that there is crying from all parties. She and Hero keep to themselves, the words spoken in Basil’s room crawling like parasites through their heads._

_She makes a decision._

_Aubrey slips out of her house just as the rosy light of dawn breaches the horizon. Sunny was discharged yesterday, the movers scheduled to arrive early. It’s a beautiful morning but she glares at the suburban scenery like it’s hiding poisonous spines. Every shape is re-interpreted now. She sees ropes dangling from lampposts and tree branches._

_This is the worst thing. The new questions that could never be answered, birthed from this knowledge like roach eggs in trash. She tries to picture the skinny silhouettes of Basil and Sunny handling that broken body, its hair spilling across Sunny’s face as they hoist it up to the tree, and her mind recoils. Why not just leave it at the foot of the stairs? What was the point of staging such a dismal scene, leaving them with their own questions, which would gnaw and warp them through the years?_

_None of Aubrey’s ideas are good ones. The one she returns to most is also the darkest – that it was some kind of retribution from Basil, re-interpreting that horrible accident so that all the blame would be placed on Mari instead. They would resent her for the “suicide,” while Sunny could instead play the grieving victim. But it’s a senseless, fevered logic, built on rotten foundations, and she knows that not even Basil would tell her the truth, no matter how forcefully she pressed him. Time would have curdled his memories of that night, which likely weren’t too clear to begin with._

_It would be easier if she could hate them. But the secret is now among them all, tying them together even as it drives them apart. It tugs her towards this familiar house whose residents are still asleep, this white-painted door with its little bronze mail slot. Aubrey reaches into her back pocket and withdraws an envelope. It’s empty, scavenged from the piles of junk mail that teeter perilously on her kitchen table, but on the paper she’s scrawled her phone number and the message: “Whenever you’re ready. – Aubrey”_

_Before she can think too hard about what she’s doing, she opens the slot and shoves the envelope in, and then turns on her heel and leaves. Maybe Sunny will take it. Maybe Sunny’s mother will find it first and hand it to him, or she’ll put it down somewhere and forget about it, or just throw it in the trash. Maybe the movers will arrive first and carelessly kick it aside, and it will be lost in the flurry of Sunny’s departure, a pearly rectangle gathering dust in a corner once all the lights have gone off and the doors locked. As she returns home, Aubrey allows herself to consider all of these possibilities, and then boxes them away and makes a promise that she will not spend the rest of the summer, or however long it takes after, waiting for the phone to ring._

* * *

She awakes at eight a.m. to the sluggish sounds of her mother preparing for work – the rattling pipes in the walls as the shower runs, the trash scattered by her shuffling feet. At eight-thirty the door opens and shuts and she hears the distant engine of her mother’s dilapidated sedan, and then she descends from her room and gets ready. She cranks the air conditioner as high as it can go. She puts on an overlarge t-shirt and a pair of badly frayed jeans, and ties her hair back with her bandana. As the clock approaches nine, she changes her rabbit’s food and water. It gratefully accepts.

At 9:02 there is a knock at the door.

Basil is wearing an undershirt and pants that at one point must have been caked entirely in mud. In each hand he grips a large bucket filled with, Aubrey guesses, everything underneath his house’s sink. The flower is missing from his hair and that’s bizarrely the most striking detail; he seems naked without it. The look in his watery blue eyes suggests that he’s spent a long night pondering exactly what awaits him today. Aubrey lets him in without a word. Slowly, he pans the inside of the house.

“Oh wow,” he breathes.

“Are you up for this?” she asks.

“It’s fine,” he says, voice trembling. “I work in dirt all the time anyway. This is just…”

“Shittier.”

He swallows hard and produces two pairs of yellow rubber gloves. “Here. They’re mostly for gardening, but they should work. I brought sandwiches too. For both of us.”

“Thanks.” She pulls on the gloves and then kicks one of the oozing, half-filled trashbags. “Start by helping me carry all of these to the curb. Then we’ll shove as much of this crap as we can into more bags. After that we'll see what happens.”

Basil takes a hesitant step and his toe clicks against a beer bottle. “Should I sort out the, uh, recyclables?”

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

They check the bags for rips and carry them outside, lining them up like convicts against a firing line, and then the real work begins. She keeps her distance from Basil as she shovels bottles and cans into the bags, stomps pizza boxes in half, shakes the takeout containers upside-down to dislodge any roosting vermin. Once she gets past the outer layers of glass and cardboard and aluminum then the deeper foulness makes itself known, food debris that has decayed into a gluey homogenous gunk, and she sucks air through her teeth as the stuff stretches and drips from her gloves. She expects to hear some kind of protest from Basil – gagging, groans of disgust – but he’s dead silent as he works; she glances at him and sees him plucking trash and bagging it with a distant expression, his eyes focused squarely on the movement of his hands.

They pace themselves; her mother doesn’t come back until five at the earliest. An hour goes by, then two. At one point Basil cries out and Aubrey doesn’t even look as she hears him stagger back and fall into the mounds.

“Roach?” she asks.

“Mouse!” He breathes deep and says again, calmer, “I think it was a mouse. It ran away.”

“Yeah, I see their turds in here. Nothing we can do about them right now.”

When lunchtime comes, the kitchen area is mostly clear. They scour their hands clean, and Basil extracts his sandwiches and parcels them out, two apiece. Aubrey asks if he wants water and he says yes please and she draws him a glass, and they eat at opposite ends of the room, Basil at the table, Aubrey leaning against the counter. Unasked questions hang in the air thick as the garbage’s reek.

The sandwiches are just PB&J, but Aubrey is grateful for anything that doesn’t make her insides feel coated in grease. She wolfs them both down before Basil is halfway through his first, and he pauses with it raised up to his mouth.

“That was fast,” he says. “Do you want the other one here?”

“I’m okay.”

“You sure? I’m fine with just one.”

“I said I’m okay,” she snaps. “You need to eat more anyway. I don’t want you passing out on me.”

“Yeah. You’re right. I never have much appetite, is all.” But he eats.

The lower substratum of trash is cleared away, revealing a pasty grey-green residue on the floor that’s resilient as rubber cement. By the time they’ve started to clear out the back hall, their supplies are running thin and the garbage bags outside have formed an oily black ziggurat that spills out into the street. Aubrey carries out a fresh one and sees Mikhail gawking across the road, and she goes back into the house without acknowledging him. When she carries out the next one, Mikhail’s been joined by the others, and as punishment for their nosiness she conscripts them into buying more bags, paper towels, floor cleaner, a decent mop. Kim exchanges a brief glance with her, and then makes them fall in line. Kim has never seen inside the house, but always suspected. She’s given Aubrey her leftover dinners and earmarked a part of her allowance to buy food and bedding for Aubrey’s rabbit. Aubrey keeps her expression stoic as she returns inside, and she finds Basil still in the hall, peering around the doorway.

“They’re going to get us more stuff,” Aubrey says. “Why the hell are you hiding?”

“They don’t like me,” he mutters.

“They don’t give a crap about you either way, Basil.” Which was true. Any hostility they’d shown towards him had built off her own. The misunderstanding with the photo album had just been the latest example. She’d hated him for his silence, the way he’d retreated into himself, reminding her so much of the stinking shell that sat before the TV set.

“To be honest,” she says, “you would probably get along okay with Charlie. She likes flowers almost as much as you do.”

“Huh? Isn’t she the one who’s…” He holds his palm high over his head, pauses, and then stands on tiptoe. Aubrey almost laughs at that.

“That’s Charlie, all right.”

“I see her in the Fix-It’s garden section sometimes, but I never thought it was because she actually wanted to be there.”

“She doesn’t go anywhere she doesn’t want to be. Who’s going to make her?”

Basil processes this. It’s the first time today that he doesn’t look nervous. Outside, the sun begins its downward arc.

“What next?” he asks at last.

“We clear out the hall, and then all that’s left is the bathroom and bedroom. I’ll take the bedroom.”

“Sure. Okay. That makes sense.”

“I’ll mop the floors here too, if there’s time.” She glares at a sticky patch. “Hope Kim and the rest hurry up.”

The trash is densest around the bedroom door – it has always seemed to Aubrey like a deliberate barricade, though she doubts her mother is capable of that sort of reasoning. She hoists up cardboard boxes filled with junk mail and moldering newspapers with covers gone abstract with age, stomps at the scuttling roaches underfoot. Basil watches her thrash and hoist the barricade for a few minutes and then gathers up bleach and tile cleaner and disappears into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

Kim returns with the supplies; she brings them to the front door and Aubrey wordlessly accepts. She can see Kim wanting to go in for a hug, but thankfully she reconsiders – the others are watching, and besides, Aubrey’s now smeared with various substances better left unidentifiable. She dismisses them, heads back inside, and then and goes to the bedroom door, gathers herself, and opens it. The knob pops with the flat sound of a gunshot.

She expects this room to be the most horrific yet, but it’s surprisingly not that bad – dark as a cellar and cloying with the smell of unwashed laundry, but largely bereft of anything that can rot, save for yet more bottles and cans and their alcoholic residue. She plucks them up like mushrooms and bags them one by one, making her way to the rumpled bed.

There are photos on the walls, their details rendered to smear by the room’s murk. She peers closer and sees that one is of her mother in her wedding gown – unsmiling even now, clutching her bouquet to her stomach like a hammer – but most of them are of her in various stages of childhood, covered in patinas of dust. Nothing of her father. The memories of his corrosive sternness have dulled with time, and in this room Aubrey recalls further details of him. He had an irrepressible sweet tooth. He was, absurdly, scared of ghosts. On rare nights they would watch movies together and laugh at the same stupid jokes. And yet he has never tried to contact her, never made any acknowledgement of their presence at all besides the money that comes in the mail.

A lump forms in her throat. She gulps it down and then makes the bed as best as she’s able. The sheets feel like dead skin.

After that room, the rest of the house almost comes as a relief. She flings the final bag in with its fellows and spends the rest of the time mopping, using one of the buckets Basil took with him. By the time he emerges from the bathroom, she’s almost managed to get a few square feet of the kitchen linoleum back to their original color.

It’s three p.m. and the mop feels like a bar of lead in Aubrey’s hands. She dumps out the washwater and she and Basil spray a mist of air freshener all throughout the rooms and then they finally collapse onto the couch, in front of the TV’s dead screen.

They cannot fix the cracked walls, or clean the fetid laundry, or exterminate the vermin that have no doubt taken refuge in whatever dark corners they can find. The floors are still discolored and movie-theater sticky and it’s possible nothing short of a paint scraper or strong acid will remove that final layer of filth. But they’ve done enough. Now cleared of its debris, the house appears larger, like it’s exhaled from a long-held breath.

They both stare directly forward, eyeing one another’s reflections. When Basil speaks, Aubrey has to struggle to hear over the air conditioner’s wheezing.

“You have ants,” he says. “Besides everything else, I mean. They come into my house sometimes. I have poison you can use. I don’t like it, but if you put it down where they’re coming out, it should help.”

“Okay,” she says.

“Maybe I could bring some plants over too? Ones that don’t need much attention. It might be nice to have something here besides…” He pauses. “The other stuff.”

“I’ll think about it,” she says. “Thanks, Basil. I couldn’t have done this alone.”

In Basil’s reflected face, Aubrey can see the words he wants to say rising up, like bodies from dark water.

“Do you want to talk about anything?” he asks, and they both know what he means.

“There’s nothing to talk about,” she says tonelessly. “We all know what happened. Now we have to live with it. The same as you.”

“I thought you’d figured it out. Or close enough, anyway. I thought that’s why you were always so mad at me. Not that I blamed you for it.”

“I didn’t. How could I?”

He touches his eye, the same one Sunny had blackened. “The night you all stayed over, I heard what you said. Through my door. I guess now you know that you didn’t have anything to apologize for.”

Aubrey says nothing, and Basil fills the silence, his voice beginning to waver.

“I couldn’t stand it,” he said. “I went over that day because I wanted to hear them practice and I saw him in his room. Holding her. And I knew it wasn’t his fault. He’d never do something like that. But no one else would have believed him. They’d look at Sunny and they wouldn’t see him anymore, they’d just see this…horrible thing. I couldn’t let that happen.” Now his words begin to fracture. “I don’t know where I got the idea to do that to her. For the longest time I told myself that it wasn’t really me, just like it wasn’t really him who’d hurt her that way. But I was wrong. It was always us. Always me. I made things worse for everyone.”

His reflection trembles and shakes. She doesn’t comfort him, or rebuke him, or make any movement. This is her final revenge – she remains still and silent, so that he must tell it all the way to the end.

“I never wanted it to be this way,” he says. “I loved you all. I loved the way you loved each other. And I ruined it for _nothing.”_ He turns to her then, tears running down his thin cheeks. “Aubrey. We can’t ever go back to the way it was, can we?”

“Of course not,” she says.

He doesn’t break down, or try to argue. He just looks down at his feet and purses his mouth and nods, and Aubrey sees his reflection’s arms tense as he prepares to rise from the couch, and she reaches over and puts an arm around his shoulders. Her expression remains stony and he doesn’t respond to her touch but he doesn’t throw her off either, and as she watches them caged within the black space of the television screen it strikes her how small and unchanged he is, his scrawny frame fragile as a bird’s beneath her hand, and she pulls him in and presses his face to her shoulder. Basil still doesn’t start sobbing; he only makes broken little vocalizations into her shirtsleeve, like he’s trying and failing to find the words that will put all this right.

After a minute or two she releases him. He takes a long, shuddering breath and rises. Aubrey hears him gathering up his buckets and bottles from around the living room, and the front door opens, letting in the rusted sunlight. It stays that way for a moment, and then it closes.

She wipes her eyes and gets up and goes to the bathroom. It hasn’t been polished to a mirror sheen but Basil did his best, scrubbing down every crevice, arranging the scattered clothes and comics into neat piles. She takes a long, scalding shower and changes into clean clothes, then returns to the couch and waits. 

The minutes pass like raindrops. At five-thirty she hears the car’s approaching engine, and imagines the headlights panning over the plastic-wrapped monument in front of the house. She gets up and stands in the middle of the room and watches the door, her fists bunched at her sides. When the knob begins to rattle, her fingernails almost punch through her skin.

Aubrey’s mother comes inside, a bag of takeout clutched in one hand. The eyes set within the sagging clay of her face dart almost fearfully around the room, and then settle on Aubrey. She bites her lip and remembers the way Sunny had spoken to them in the hospital room, that clipped intonation.

“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she says. “I can’t force you to take care of yourself, but I don’t have to live that way, either. From now on, I’ll clean up whatever messes you leave behind. I can clean them faster than you can make them. I’ll keep doing it until I can finally get out of here, and then you can go back to living in shit. Alone.”

She falls silent, goes rigid. There’s no telling what will happen now. But her mother stays put, for so long that Aubrey deliriously thinks that she hadn’t actually spoken, that her little monologue had played out completely in her mind as her mother remains in the doorway waiting for an explanation – until she finally moves, creeping around the room’s periphery like there are landmines underfoot, eyes still fixed on Aubrey. She puts the food down on the table, goes to the hall, casts one final glance behind her, then disappears. Aubrey hears the bedroom door shut.

The air conditioner sputters and spits as she goes numbly over to the food, the cardboard containers still warm enough to emit steam. She eats what she can and then goes to her own room. The sky outside her window is the color of a bruise. Aubrey shuffles to her bed and collapses onto the mattress, falling into a sleep so deep that dreams can’t find her.

* * *

The humid air wakes her once again, still fully clothed, the rancid taste of her dinner clinging to the inside of her mouth. She groans and pushes herself up and sees that the sky has gone fully black. Her clock reads half past midnight.

Her rabbit is also awake, nose twitching as the fan’s breeze ruffles its fur. She goes to its hutch, checks its bottle, then reaches inside and strokes it. It accepts her touch without complaint. She feels a twinge of senseless guilt for not telling Basil about the rabbit while he was over; he would have liked it.

The house downstairs is the same as she had left it. No new litter on the floor. She pours some water to wash the taste out of her mouth and notices fresh dishes drying in the sink. Inside the fridge, the leftover food sits on the racks, still in its half-filled containers. No beer bottles in the trashcan. Aubrey doesn’t get her hopes up. She knows very well that the first night means little compared to all the nights which come after. But it’s something.

She goes outside.

The crickets’ din drowns out the rumble of the air conditioner as she walks down her driveway; the heap of garbage bags glimmers in the streetlamp like a sculpture carved of black ice. Aubrey rounds the corner, travels up the block, peers down the street. Every window is blackened at this hour, including Kel’s. Maybe tomorrow – or not, because tomorrow has already arrived – she’ll go looking for the brothers, or explain some things to Kim, or visit Polly and ensure that Basil hasn’t worked himself sick from today. But all of that must wait until dawn.

Between the pools of light cast from the streetlamps, fireflies send up their irregular glow. She follows their signals to the park, past the playground’s metallic gleam and the pale orb of the tetherball (once upon a time it had dangled at headbutt-height; now it barely comes up to her chest). As she approaches the brambly path separating the park from the lakeside clearing, her steps quicken, as though she’s being pulled toward a magnet.

The lake is still and black as space. In its center is the statue, shapeless and inexplicable even in daylight, now reduced to a slumped gash of deeper darkness. The dock’s planks creak beneath Aubrey’s feet as she walks to its edge and looks down, and sees her hair reflected, disembodied. It already feels like a hundred years ago, when she’d accidentally sent a trembling, weeping Basil off this dock and into the water where his thrashing had pulled him under faster than she could react. She’d stood there uselessly as Kel, the idiot, sent Sunny after him. Two drowning boys struggling to pull one another to the surface.

She shivers and puts her hands in her pockets, and her fingers brush the lighter and her cigarettes. With consideration, she extracts one and tucks it into her mouth, then brings up the lighter and strikes it. It fails to light and she strikes it again. And again. Its sparks flash and settle into the hollows of her face, but the flame doesn’t catch.

She glowers, braces her thumb against its wheel one final time – and then stops, relaxes, lets it down. The unlit cigarette is a bright chalkline across her jaw as she looks up to the wheeling stars overhead. The air smells of grass, honeysuckle, crisp lake water, and Aubrey closes her eyes, breathes it in.

* * *

_They’ve been preparing for this day ever since they found the hidden lake – or Kel and Hero have, at least, and dragged the rest of them into it through sheer enthusiasm. They’re considerate enough to wait until Mari sets up the picnic blanket before charging off to the statue in the middle of the water, with Sunny hesitantly paddling along. Aubrey stays with the blanket – she brought her swimsuit but even in summer the lake is shockingly cold, and she’s not interested in getting splashed – while Basil fiddles with his camera as always. Mari sits and reads, her sundress puddled around her._

_Kel jumps. Hero jumps. Kel does a cannonball. Hero makes a tragic, splay-limbed attempt at a dive (he’s growing too fast for his sense of coordination to keep up). Sunny clings to the statue’s base, his head bobbing up and down to follow each brother’s descent, until they finally cajole him into climbing to the top. He stands at the edge, toes flexing, as Aubrey cheers him on and Basil readies his camera._

_But something is wrong. Sunny makes a convulsing, twisting movement before he strikes the water flat on his belly; Aubrey winces at the sight, and Basil lowers his camera, his finger still on the shutter. The brothers smile and watch the surface. When the ripples disappear, they’re no longer smiling. Several more seconds pass with nothing but the cheerful birdsong overhead, and that’s when Aubrey gets up and runs to the dock’s edge. She sees panic curdling on their faces and sucks in air, preparing to scream for them to help him, but there’s a rapid patter of feet beside her and then a hovering shape over the water, a chiaroscuro billow, Mari’s black hair and pale dress suspended there like an inkblot._

_Mari hits the lake and it devours her too, and Aubrey watches its surface, trying to catch a glimpse of something. But Mari emerges at the shoreline instead, the water behind Aubrey erupting, and by the time she turns back Mari has already fallen to her knees with Sunny still in her grip. The brothers are already swimming back to shore and Basil rushes over with his camera abandoned, but Aubrey reaches him first, Sunny gasping for breath with his face over Mari’s shoulder, framed by the tendrils of her hair – drenched and wide-eyed, so beautifully amazed that he is still alive._


End file.
